In today's digital society organizations depend on having ready access to their data. Data, however, can be lost in a variety of ways such as through accidental deletion, data corruption, disasters and catastrophes (e.g., fires or flooding), media failures (e.g., disk crash), computer viruses, and so forth. Thus, it is important to backup data in the event that the data needs to be restored.
A problem with restoring a backup, however, is the time required for the restore. For example, a backed up object such as a big data application or virtual machine may be many gigabytes in size. It can take a great deal of time to recover such a large amount of data. As a result, a production environment that has suffered a failure may be unavailable for some period of time. Further, backup administrators may wish to routinely test the recovery of a backup or may wish to recover a backup for purposes other than disaster recovery. For example, a backup may be recovered for analytical purposes. Again, in all these cases the restoration process can be very lengthy and time-consuming, thus leading to a decrease in overall productivity.
Therefore, there is a need for improved systems and techniques to reduce the amount of time required to recover a backup.
The subject matter discussed in the background section should not be assumed to be prior art merely as a result of its mention in the background section. Similarly, a problem mentioned in the background section or associated with the subject matter of the background section should not be assumed to have been previously recognized in the prior art. The subject matter in the background section merely represents different approaches, which in and of themselves may also be inventions. EMC, Data Domain, Data Domain Restorer, and Data Domain Boost are trademarks of Dell EMC Corporation.